Dell, Canonical to sell Ubuntu PCs at retail locations in China

Canonical has announced a new program in collaboration with Dell to sell …

Canonical and Dell are teaming up to sell computers with Ubuntu preinstalled at stores in China. The program, which could help improve the mainstream visibility of the Linux-based operating system, will span 220 retail locations.

According to a statement that Canonical posted this morning on its official blog, the products will be set up with marketing materials that tout the virtues of the Ubuntu platform. Retail staff will also be trained to explain the products to consumers.

Dell initially began offering products with Ubuntu preinstalled to general consumers in 2007 after seeing significant demand on its IdeaStorm site. As we pointed out at the time, the IdeaStorm upvotes were coming from advocates of the platform rather than consumers who genuinely wanted to buy Dell computers with Linux preinstalled. We argued that it would be more sensible for Dell to simply indicate which hardware configurations are Linux-compatible rather than providing preinstallation.

There have been a few incidents where consumers who were confused by the Ubuntu option ended up with a product that they didn’t want or understand—sometimes with bizarre results. Dell no longer appears to offer Ubuntu on regular consumer models from its US website. Visiting dell.com/ubuntu shows an error message: “no configurations are valid for the chosen filters.”

Canonical has also previously experimented with retail placement of installation media. Boxed copies of Ubuntu were sold at Best Buy in 2008 for $19.99. It’s not clear if that effort had a meaningful impact on Ubuntu adoption, but it seems unlikely.

China is generally thought to be more friendly to Linux on the desktop. Various government agencies in the country have adopted the open source operating system as part of an effort to eliminate piracy in government IT. Many of the government deployments in China reportedly use the native Red Flag Linux, however, rather than a foreign flavor of the operating system.

As we reported in our recent review of Ubuntu 11.10, the operating system is maturing and has much to offer consumers, but also still suffers from some technical deficiencies in key areas like hardware support. Dell will presumably be tailoring the hardware and software to offer the best possible experience, but it’s still not clear whether it will appeal to regular end users.